IBM Impact2014, from April 27-May 1 at Venetian Las Vegas, brings together leading IT & business professionals from around the world to collaborate, innovate, and maximize their business effectiveness. Impact 2014 will deliver four days of best practices, technical education and roadmaps for business transformation and leverage deep insights from topics like mobile, cloud, big data & analytics, smarter process, connectivity, application infrastructure and the internet of things with more than 600 interactive sessions.

The Impact2014 conference is the ideal place to meet with IBM experts, business partners, and clients to gain insights into the latest happenings in IBM. And this year at Impact, IBM’s System z and Power Systems will be among the major attractions. Let’s take a look at some of the key highlights of System z and Power Systems at Impact2014:

System z at Impact2014:

There will be more than 100 System z related unique sessions, including lectures, labs, panels and meet the experts’ sessions across all of the tracks at Impact such as Cloud, Mobile and Application Infrastructure. Likewise, there will be System z Solution Suite that will provide you opportunity to meet 1-on-1 with technical experts for in-depth discussions and demonstrations of the latest z capabilities for mobile and cloud, as well as the latest solutions to modernize and manage your application portfolio on System z. New this year will be the all-day Guided Tours, a Lab style session led by top subject matter experts designed to walk you through a detailed usage scenario for a solution. Moreover, the Sunday evening opening of the z Zone in the Solution EXPO will feature System z, z software solutions and the Mainframe50 anniversary. Be sure to stop by the z Zone Sunday evening (April 27th) and throughout the week to speak with IBM experts and enjoy some fun and networking at the same time. And the System z Client Reception on Monday, April 28th night at the Tao in the Venetian, will offer you a unique networking opportunity with IBM executives as well as other System z clients. The formal education at Impact2014 is only part of the experience, it's also the networking and impromptu discussions that complete the Impact experience.

Power Systems at Impact2014:

Power Systems will be many places at Impact2014 – including the general session keynotes, breakout sessions, and a large presence in the EXPO center. Watch the Power Systems’ virtual track to learn about the new open innovations in Power Systems - designed to put data to work in ways never before possible. The Power Systems’ hands on labs and exclusive sessionsat Impact2014 will help you learn how Power Systems are transforming big data and analytics, cloud and mobile into competitive advantage. See Power Systems up close in both the Power zone and the Infrastructure Matters zone in the EXPO Center to view demos, talk to experts and learn about exciting new innovations built into Power Systems. You can also meet members of the OpenPOWER Foundation who will have a booth to discuss the ways in which they are extending POWER capabilities and delivering the world’s first open server ecosystem.

In addition to these, we have many more reasons in store for you to attend Impact2014. I am sure you won’t want to miss these exciting events! Register today and join us at Impact2014! To stay connected, follow #ibmimpact conversation on Twitter.

During the latter half of my career I’ve spent a lot of time working with disruptive application technologies, so I know firsthand just how dynamic and unpredictable new business workloads can be from the perspective of infrastructure utilization. Yet, IT staffs are mainly trying to support this new breed of applications with data center technologies, processes and procedures that were originally developed to manage highly repetitive and predictable sequential transactions. The tension between twenty-first-century workloads and twentieth-century IT is almost palpable, and the answer, according to some, will be something called the software-defined environment (SDE).

Being an inquisitive IBMer (is there any other kind?); I wanted to better understand our SDE strategy. After my searches turned up very little formal information—mainly this brief article on the IBM PartnerWorld website and a short YouTube video—I decided to pay a visit to my good friend and colleague Jeff Frey.

Jeff is an IBM Fellow and Chief Technology Officer of the System z platform. His fingerprints are all over every major advance in mainframe technology for the past 30 years, so I had a feeling that he’d be able to fill my knowledge gap. I was not disappointed!